Thousands of girls audition for talent shows every year. All of them want to be famous. But fame doesn’t guarantee happiness. Many find themselves suffering fame. In Japan, the idol culture has a high price to pay. Most idols become slaves of their record companies and agencies, popularity turns into their worst enemy.
Yesterday was the anniversary of the death of Yukiko Okada. She won a talent show in the 80s and killed herself at the peak of her success, she was only 18. Why? Nothing is clear but she became a symbol of the dangers of fame for teenagers. And this sad story didn’t end there, more deaths were about to follow hers.
Yukiko Okada was born in 1967, she was a normal little girl who loved to read books and sing. When she was in high school she decided to become a singer and made auditions for many talent shows in Japan. She was rejected time after time, but she kept trying until she got a ‘yes‘.
She was accepted, at 15, for a show called Star Tanjō! in 1983, and surprisingly she won! She released her debut single “First Date” in 1984 and became Japan’s teen idol. Fans loved her permanent innocent smile and her success was growing every day. She released some albums, won awards, appeared on tv shows, series… and was the face for a Kanebo Cosmetic’s campaign. All her childhood dreams became true.
On February 10 (1986), her single single “Kuchibiru Network” reached number one on the charts. On April 7 she met some friends to see the film Rocky 4, everything seemed normal. The next day, on April 8, the manager of Sun Music, her record company, went to her apartment in Tokyo and smelled gas. He entered the apartment and found her sobbing inside a closet with her wrists slashed. She was brought to the company building and two hours later she jumped from the seventh floor and killed herself.
This shocking story is full of mysteries. No one really knows why Yukiko, the girl with the eternal smile, wanted to kill herself. Her only complaints to friends were that she wanted to be liked by people. She left some notes in her apartment. In the notes she talks about a relationship with an older man. I don’t know if the suicide notes were made public after her dead by Japanese newspapers but we know that she ended them with these words: “my heart has nowhere else to go“.
People close to Yukiko mentioned her mental health deteriorated in the weeks prior to her death, others say she was bipolar, rumours are never-ending. But everyone’s first reaction is to try to find an explanation after someone commits suicide, it’s part of human nature.
Why wasn’t she taken to a hospital after she was found in her closet? Why was she left alone after the first two suicide attempts? Many questions remain tragically unanswered.
Remember our ‘Japanese gals’ post from last week where we mentioned the film Sukeban Deka? One of the actresses in the tv adaptation of the film and soon-to-be idol singer Yasuko Endô committed suicide by jumping from her rooftop less than 2 weeks before Yukiko. Looks like Endō killed herself after the ‘no dating’ rule imposed by the idol industry.
Maybe that was also Yukiko’s problem with the older man. Nia wrote a very interesting post some time ago about the pressure of being an idol in Japan, definitely worth the read! Other theories say a man in the company took advantage of Yukiko and she couldn’t cope with it anymore. In the book Contemporary Portraits of Japanese Women
A journalist got to the record company building after finding out about the first suicide attempt (who called him? maybe the company?) and he took some heartbreaking photos of poor Yukiko dead after the fall (click at your own risk, nothing graphic just a black and white picture of her lying face down on the floor). The company released 2 posthumous albums, memorial editions of her old ones, re-released her books and DVD… They are still releasing Yukiko singles in the 21st Century (2002).
She was a teen idol and her suicide shocked the nation, but a new tragedy was about to unfold in the form of copycat suicides. 1986 was the year with the biggest suicide rate in the history of Japan. Teens all over the country started killing themselves, many jumping from buildings, one even at the same record company building as Yukiko. Numbers suggest there were at least 31 teens who killed themselves, 19 by jumping from buildings in the two following weeks. The media called these deaths the ‘Yukiko syndrome‘. Japan has a very high rate of suicides even more in Spring, but the weeks after Yukiko’s death suicides reached a new peak, with at least one young girl admitting she “wanted to be like Yukiko” to her sister before jumping from a building.
